The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
Advances in modern computing technology have enabled active video games, exergames, or interactive fitness games that combine physical activities with video games to promote fitness and healthy living, by relying on real-time motion tracking techniques and virtual reality capabilities. Yet, no existing system allows networked play of physical games using general purpose mobile computing devices. Some gyms, health clubs, recreational centers, and schools incorporate exergames into their facilities using specialized equipment. For example, interactive wall-climbing games, active floor and wall games, and dance and step games have become popular in recent years, but each require pre-installed sensing and display devices such as interactive walls and floors with embedded sensors, and large projector screens. For home gaming systems, dedicated gaming consoles, handheld remote controllers, motion sensing controllers, and other accessories such as arm straps, headsets, balance boards, and dance mats are often needed. Examples of home systems include Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect, and PlayStation VR.
Mobile games have proliferated over the past decade, with lessened dependence on specialized, stationary hardware, and some mobile games such as Pokemon Go can incorporate physical locations to encourage physical movements of the player in an augmented reality setting, but such games are still played mostly on-screen. The limited computational resources in a mobile device present a unique challenge in the real-time capture and analysis of game actions. For instance, a smartphone's limited CPU processing power is heat-sensitive. CPU clock rate is reduced by the operating system (OS) whenever the phone heats up. Also, when a system consumes too much memory, the system or application running on the system may be terminated by the OS. Currently no existing gaming platforms or applications can facilitate the interactive play of physical games or activities with mobile computing devices alone.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to design a mobile platform that enables interactive physical gaming, without the need for dedicated sensors, controls, consoles, displays, or similar gaming accessories. It would also be an advancement in the state of the art to enable remote, multiplayer, real-time play of interactive physical games and activities with mobile devices.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.